Mali-400 series has been successful for ARM in low cost designs. Their royalty rate for these GPU is arveraging 5c.

However, T series has generally disapointed to date. T604 was a diasater, T658 was announced, with samsung as a "launch partner", then quietly dropped. Your article states T678 has saw "little demand" ( ANY demand ?) T628 has appeared in a couple of tablets, no sign yet in a smartphone. And their big licencee, Samsung, is as likely to use Qualcomm/Intel in their CE products as their own socs, which isn't a ringing endorsement. T series is 3 years old. I'd be surprised if total shipments exceed 10M. Imaginaton hit 9M Rogue shipments in 3 days in the iphone launch, and once the new ipads are shipping, will be hitting close to 1M a day, soley from Apple.

Arm will have little insight into IMG's future roadmap, so saying that "we believe we will far surpass where Imagination is for some time" is pure marketing and not based on any data whatsoever. IMG are already on record for some years saying that Rogue can extend to 1TFlop performance.

I don't think this is the real problem. Every good Company, with a good team, can produce a fast phone GPU. It is not rocket technology at the end of the day, even Intel can (and will) perform well with the right motivation and a strong team of GPU engineers. In this moment ARM is where was Imagination one year ago with G6630. I pretty believe that in few months Imagination will ship an even faster GPU and ARM will go again behind.

The real problem is power consumption, market acceptance and drivers. Only Nvidia and AMD have the resources to ship reliable drivers and all these ARM numbers means nothing without a good software. IMO Nvidia will be the winner in the long term in high end handset GPU market.

Moreover i don't think this race will be productive in upcoming years; unfortunately the power consumption will become quickly a severe issue and next nodes will not deliver anymore the same benefit we have seen at 45/32/28 nm.

if Mali is indeed better, or at least has the same performance this is really bad news for Imagination...up to now they were deemed the emerging kings of IP for graphics...soft of like ARM was several years ago...but ARM was always better than Intel in performance/power

If you are going to be made obsolete then you need to make sure that you are the one making previous products so before your competition does it for you. This could be an increase in the aggressive incursion of ARM into even more applications that further locks out Intel.

Good Improvement as compared to previous cores of Mali GPUs, but will they be accepted in the price competitive mid-segment portable devices? If the they are not going to increase the prices then only the improved versions will be accepted and used more.

I think we're just beginning to see a very exciting competition in mobile graphics. With Nvidia joining the frey, more attention is going to come to the area (even if they don't have a huge impact themselves as according to ARM). I think we'll see more large gaming companies targeting mobile along side consoles. This could et really fun really soon!